CHRIS RICE COOPER is a newspaper writer, feature stories writer, poet, fiction writer, photographer, and painter. She maintains a blog at https://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com. She has a Bachelor's in Criminal Justice and completed all of her poetry and fiction workshops required for her Master’s in Creative Writing with a focus on poetry. She, her husband Wayne, sons Nicholas and Caleb, cats Nation and Alaska reside in the St. Louis area.

Personal
Geography
consists of three sections focusing on Glose’s experiences in life.The first section “Rainy Monday” focuses on
his childhood and the influences of his father and the military; Glose’s relationships with women, including
his mother and his past loves are revealed in “Date Night”; and last but not
least Glose’s great love affair with writing is concluded in “Weekend at the
Coffeehouse.”

Bill Glose described Personal Geography as more than just a poetry collection.

“The
poems in Personal Geography essentially serve as my autobiography. And white
it’s true that Personal Geography contains some war poems, nothing in this book
has appeared in either of my other two books.They are all “new”.

“Rainy Monday” is centered on Glose’s
relationship with his father, an F-4 Phantom pilot in the Air Force who served
in Vietnam.

John GLose standing on the steps leading up to the cockpit of a T-38 Talon.

Glose’s relationship with
his father is one of pain, fear, and then realization of the good motives of a
father who did not know how to express love tenderly.

An example of this is in “Men of His Generation”
when Glose speaks of his father catching him and his sisters stealing a pack of
cigarettes from his pack.

Bill and John Glose July 4, 2016

He sat us on

hard-backed
chairs to chain-smoke

through
tears till the floor

was
stained with hate.

Each
time

we
stubbed one out

he’d
light another, force it

in
our mouths.We didn’t know

that
this was love,

but
none of us

ever
smoked again.

Glose uses metaphors and similes and colorful
language to describe his upbringing by his father in the poem “Exhuming the
Past;” buried secrets of his childhood are compared to that of a buried dog’s
favorite bones.He describes the hiding
place of his pain and desires to that of a glossy apple’s skin.In the second and final stanza he compares
his upbringing “as ominous as a scene from Hitchcock.”

Logo for The Alfred Hitchcock presents

In the poem “Father’s Day” Glose
identifies with his father by both serving in the military. It is this poem that Glose recognizes his
father as not a demon or a god but a human being.

Bill Glose in military uniform

I’d always thought he didn’t
need

comfort
of words, but wearing my own wavy hair,

hazel
eyes like solemn beads, I can finally see

the
spear of doubt, colossus reduced to half a man.

The second section “Date Night” begins with
poems about love and ends with poems about failed relationships.Four of the poems are about one woman
specifically, who remains unnamed:“Earrings,”“Vacation Jar,” “Omission,”
and “Renaming the Planets.”

Bill Glose and the unnamed love The poem that has the most backstory from Personal Geography is “Renaming the
Planets,” a poem that came to Glose on a hot August morning in 2006, as he was
eating a bowl of Kellogg’s Raisin Bran and reading the newspaper article titled
“The International Astronomical Union downgraded the status of Pluto to that of
‘dwarf planet.”

Map showing the members of the International Astronomical Union. Public Domain

Glose explained in greater detail to me in an
interview via email:“This means that from now on only the rocky
worlds of the inner Solar System and the gas giants of the outer system will be
designated as planets.”

The sun and the eight planets CCBSA3.0

The
article went on to talk about Pluto’s erratic orbit overlapping with Neptune’s
and how four other objects orbiting our sun (Ceres, Makemake, Haumea, and Eris)
were similar in size to Pluto but not deemed planets.

I didn’t
know a lot about our solar system, just enough to name the nine planets by the
mnemonic device My Very Early Mother
Just Served Us Nine Pies, the name of the outer band of asteroids (the
Kuiper Belt), and the fact that the outermost planet, Pluto, had been
discovered by an American (Clyde Tombaugh in 1930). This last fact gave me a
small sense of pride, as it must have Walt Disney, who named his iconic dog
character after the final planet in our system.

Clyde Tombaugh with his homemade telescope he used to discover Pluto. 1930. Public Domain

But, like
an editor armed with a red pen, the IAU had slashed Pluto from the list of
planets and changed our accepted notions like a kick in the gut. I sat there,
staring out through my bay window at squirrels bounding through my thick lawn
as my cereal grew soggy. How many other times, I wondered, had accepted notions
been pulled out from under us to send us tumbling into a new brand of
knowledge?

Bill Glose at First Landing State Park. 10-29-2009

I started
scribbling in the newsprint margins of my Daily Press: The flat world theory. The land bridge theory.
Earth as the center of the universe. After my scrawl filled the available white
space, I took my notes to the computer and wrote a poem about the changing
views of science. I did some research and added bits about Copernicus and
Newtonian physics and so on. Filled with multi-syllable science and
hard-to-explain theories, the poem was bad. Very, very bad.

Bill Glose reading at Richmond's Cafe Zata. June of 2016

After the
poem sat for a long while, I read another story in the paper about how the
Perseids Meteor Shower would be viewable by the naked eye in the middle of the
night. I strolled through my suburban neighborhood that night in search of a
dark spot and lay down on the road where the streetlights ended.

The Perseids Meteor Shower striking the sky just to the left of the milky way. CCBSA3.0

As I lay
there on my back waiting for the meteor shower, my mind drifted. Although I was
lying on asphalt aggregate, I remembered lying next to an old girlfriend on a
wooden pier in White Lake, North Carolina. That had been during our honeymoon
phase, when neither of us saw fault in anything the other did and I was certain
we would be together forever. Just like Pluto’s status, that notion was not to
be either.

Dusk at Whiteface, North Carolina

As I lay
there in the street mulling what might have been, I saw the first streaks of
light overhead, bright whispers that flashed for the briefest moments before
being swallowed by black. A frisson coursed up my spine. I stared up, and the
light show continued, winking sparks that scored the sky. And in the time between,
I thought how wonderful it was that science had figured out this coming meteor
shower.

Bill Glose writing

When I
returned home, I fell upon my old draft of the poem and wove in these personal
tidbits from my life, lending soft emotion to its sharp-edged facts. It went
through several more drafts before I was satisfied, but the end result was that
the science became an accessory to a poem about relationships.”

Bill Glose with one of his first loves- books!

Two years later, in 2008, Glose submitted,
“Renaming the Planets” to a contest sponsored by the West Virginia Poetry
Society, which resulted in “Renaming the Planets” winning the Morgantown
Chapter Award.

Morgantown Chapter Award Certificate

Renaming
the Planets

Backs
on pier’s cool planks, fingers

intertwined,
my girlfriend and I

gaze
into forever as comets

tear
open the sky, bright streaks

winking
like distant fireflies.

Beyond
them, a dwarf planet sulks

in
its orbit. Einstein said nothing

could
outrun physics’ laws;

even
time must bend to fit its rules.

Yet
scientists once declared Earth

center
of our universe;

earlier
still, that it was flat.

Evolution
of what is certain

proves
nothing is absolute,

not
even a Rockwell scene

of
young lovers beside

a
lake, waiting for the future

to
arrive from heaven.

My favorite section of Personal Geography is “Weekend at the
Coffeehouse” which details Glose’s love affair with writing.In “Look at What I have Left” Glose compares
his experience of writing to drinking a glass of wine, something that frees him
and doesn’t constrain him, and something that always has blank pages for him to
write, like a half glass of wine, always “waiting to refill it.”

Photo of wine glass attribution unknown

“Listening to the Great Poet” includes a
quote by Natasha Trethewey and focuses both on the writer’s greatest fear,
rejection, and the writer’s greatest need, encouragement.

Natasha Trethewey GFDL 1.2

Glose encourages writers who are rejected
continuously in the poem “Support Group” where Glose , with great humor, gives
every writer their greatest fantasy:

Bill Glose on the Eastern Shore

He
could have published my beautiful poem,

the
one I’m reading now to hundreds

of
rapt listeners, each paying fifty dollars

for
the pleasure.The crowd stands

in
ovation, except the editor, who cowers

while
I pull from my jacket pocket

his
rejection letter, unsheathing it

like
a knight brandishing a sword,

ready
to vanquish the dragon and bask

in
adulation so rightly deserved.

Bill Glose at Shenandoah Park April of 2010

In “The World I Imagine,” Glose empowers rejected
writers that through his or her words, he or she is able to create a new
world:

The
world I imagine is more exciting than the one

I
inhabit, where my fingers run across keys in time

with
footfalls of the damsel in my tale,

escaping
a dragon or simply chasing after a bus.

Bill Glose in 2013

In the last stanza of “The World I Imagine”
Glose insists that even though he is a creator of this world, he can not be a
full participant and instead, must surrender to this living thing within him
called the Muse.It is the muse that is
the participant but Glose is the writer, the all powerful one, but only when he
is in the process of writing:

I am a mute passenger on this
bus,

uncertain
of its destination until I step off the running board

and
find myself in my desk chair,

Bill Glose "Fierce"

In “the Drowning Muse’ Glose describes the words
he writes as saints who pray and describes the writing muse within him as not
belonging to him but another being coming to life:

Towering
statue of a woman

in
my dreams is not my dream

but
blue breath of the muse

come
to life.

Bill Glose January 12, 2010

In “Morning Hours” Glose continues to
give writers who face rejection great empowerment, by simply suggesting he or
she continue to do one thing – to write his or her own world of words: